“Phone rings, door chimes, in comes company!” – Alice Saville’s response to Marianne Elliott’s reimagining of Sondheim is structured around the show’s lyrics.

Casual cruelty: Martin McDonagh’s play mixes crude colonialist satire with the trappings of a family Christmas show.

‘an unrehearsed drag race explodes like a glitter bomb inside Shakespeare’s wooden O’: Freddie Machin on Andrew Logan’s radical drag pageant

Graft, grit and glitter: Francesca Peschier writes on the shifting layers of Emma Rice’s retelling of Angela Carter’s story.

As Matthew Lopez’s gay epic transfers from the Young Vic to the West End, Frey Kwa Kawking writes on its sprawling, compassionate glory.

Uncanny valley: David Hare’s satire of Labour politics might be set in the present day, but it belongs in another era.

Shakespeare as party: Lauren Mooney writes on a fantastically warm, welcoming opener to Kwame Kwei-Armah’s reign at the Young Vic.

The waves are rolling in or moving out: Rosemary Waugh reviews Katie Mitchell and Alice Birch’s latest collaboration.

Perfumed sails: Sophie Okonedo shines in the NT’s swimmingly beautiful staging of Shakespeare’s prickly love story.

Desire is everything: Adena Jacobs’ staging of Strauss’s opera is full of ponytail-slick, sensuous, striking images.

Invisible women: Josephine Balfour-Oatts reviews Annie-B Parson’s feminist dance response to Samuel Pepys’ Diary

Marriage and infidelity: Ed Nightingale reviews Jamie Lloyd’s productions of The Lover and The Collection.

The common soldiers, the everyday heroes: Ava Davies reviews Alice Oswald’s elegy to the dead of the Iliad.

The question of ownership: Frey Kwa Hawking reviews Debris Stevenson’s autobiographical ode to grime.

Excruciating silences: Peter Brook’s drama is an exercise in painfully slow abstraction.